In a 1999 article profiling six of “China’s bright young stars,” the New York Times described Junning Liu as “one of China’s most influential liberal political thinkers.” Today, sitting in a delegate-style conference room, Liu wants to add a point to Thomas C. Heller’s discussion of risk assessment and the role of law in doing business. If assets are not protected by legal institutions, Heller argues, foreign direct investment becomes a riskier prospect and economic growth suffers as a result. Except, he points out, in China. The legal system doesn’t manage risk but China is growing extremely fast.

“There are more businesspeople in Chinese prisons than dissidents,” Liu says evenly, with a suggestion of a smile. “So you see … Chinese people mind the situation more than you [the foreign investors] do.”

Liu is one of 26 change-makers from developing democracies who were selected from more than 800 applicants to take part in this year’s Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program, which is offered by FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). His colleagues in the program are presidential advisors and attorneys general, journalists and civic activists, academics and members of the international development community. They traveled to Stanford from 21 countries in transition, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, Egypt, and Nigeria. And like their academic curriculum during the three-week program, which examines linkages among democracy, economic development, and the rule of law, their professional experiences and fields of study center on these three areas, assuring that each fellow brings a seasoned perspective to the program’s discussions.

“For most of the fellows … democracy is seen not as a luxury or an option, but rather as a necessity for achieving broad-based development and a genuine rule of law.”The curriculum for the first week focused on democracy, with leading comparative democracy scholars Michael A. McFaul, Larry Diamond, and Kathryn Stoner team-teaching the morning seminars. Using selected articles and book chapters as starting points for discussion, McFaul, Diamond, and Stoner-Weiss began the weeklong democracy module with an examination of what democracy is and what definition or definitions might apply to distinguish electoral democracy, liberal democracy, and competitive authoritarianism. Another question discussed was whether there was such a thing as Islamic democracy, Asian democracy, Russian democracy, or American democracy.

As the week progressed, fellows and faculty discussed institutions of democracy, electoral systems, horizontal accountability, development of civil society, democratic transitions, and global trends in democracy promotion. Fellows led sessions themselves in the afternoons, comparing experiences and sharing insights into how well political parties and parliaments constrained executive power and how civil society organizations contributed to democratic consolidation and/or democratic transitions.

In addition to discussing their personal experiences with democracy promotion, fellows met with a broad range of practitioners, including USAID deputy director Maria Rendon, IREX president Mark Pomar, MoveOn.org founder Joan Blades, Freedom House chairman and International Center on Nonviolent Conflict founding chair Peter Ackerman, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict president Jack DuVall, Otpor cofounder Ivan Marovic, A Force More Powerful documentary filmmaker Steve York, and Advocacy Institute cofounder David Cohen. Guest speakers talked about their fieldwork, offered practical advice, and answered fellows’ questions. This component grounded the classroom discussions in a practical context. “It was important for our visiting fellows to interact with American practitioners, both to learn about innovative techniques for improving democracy practices but also to hear about frustrations and failures that Americans also face in working to make democracy and democracy promotion work more effectively,” explains McFaul. “We Americans do not have all the answers and have much to learn from interaction with those in the trenches working to improve governance in their countries.”

The following two weeks would focus in turn on development and the rule of law, but democracy continued to serve as the intellectual lynchpin of the program, with economies and legal institutions analyzed vis-à-vis their relationship to the development of democratic systems.

“For most of the fellows, who come from national circumstances which once suffered (or still do suffer) prolonged authoritarian rule, democracy is seen not as a luxury or an option, but rather as a necessity for achieving broad-based development and a genuine rule of law,” says Diamond. “Unless people have the ability to turn bad rulers out of office, and to hold rulers accountable in between elections through a free press and civil society, countries stand a poor prospect of controlling corruption, protecting human rights, correcting policy mistakes, and ensuring that government is responsive to the needs and aspirations of the people.”

Among the fellows, this idea of democracy as a “necessity,” a fundamental platform from which to pursue economic and legal reforms, was widely recognized. “It appears that like-minded people were selected to participate,” notes Sani Aliyu, a broadcast journalist and interfaith mediator from Nigeria. “Each of us is interested in the development of humanity, and it appears that we have accepted that democracy seems to be the vehicle through which human development can be accessed reasonably. We share this."

As the program’s curriculum shifted to development issues for week two, the all-volunteer assemblage of Stanford faculty expanded to include professors and professional research staff from Stanford Law School, the Graduate School of Business, and the Department of Economics. Avner Greif established the context for the development module with an overview of institutional foundations of politics and markets, followed by discussions of growth restructuring in transitional economies with GSB professor Peter B. Henry and Stanford Center for International Development deputy director Nicholas Hope. Terry L. Karl analyzed corruption in developing economies and the “resource curse,” and Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, joined Diamond, McFaul, and Karl in discussing how the spectrum of democratic to autocratic systems of government affected a country’s development.

Another salient component of the development module centered on the role of media in promoting democracy and development. The field trip to San Francisco, which included a session with KQED Forum host Michael Krasny, a briefing on international reporting at the San Francisco Chronicle, and a discussion of media strategies at the Family Violence Prevention Fund, provided particularly rich practical content, as did the fellows’ roundtable on maintaining media independence in semi-autocracies.

At KQED Radio, Cuban-born Raul Ramirez, the executive producer of Forum, talked with fellows about the concept of “civic journalism” and KQED’s goal of creating space for civic discussion. Forum host Michael Krasny and Ramirez, who runs workshops on civic journalism at the European Journalism Centre in Maastricht, then fielded a barrage of questions from fellows: How does KQED maintain independence from government and commercial funding? If Rush Limbaugh attacked you, would you respond in your program? Is it possible to have neutral, nonpartisan public radio? How do you manage to deal with political issues, particularly when you start to affect the power structures with your programming? Are there any words, like “terrorist,” that you are banned from using on the air?

“Discussion of this kind is of great importance to both media professionals and the audience,” notes Anna Sevortian, a journalist and research coordinator at the Center for Development of Democracy and Human Rights in Moscow. “It helps you to clarify how a particular newspaper, TV, or radio station is dealing with matters of public policy or of political controversy.”

The third week’s curriculum layered rule-of-law issues onto the conceptual modules of democracy promotion and economic development, drawing on the teaching caliber of constitutional scholar and Stanford president emeritus Gerhard Casper, Erik Jensen, Helen Stacy, Allen S. Weiner, Tom Heller, and Richard Burt. After establishing a theoretical framework through discussions of the role of law, constitutionalism, human rights, transitional justice, the role of law in business and economic development, and strategies for promoting the rule of law, fellows compared experiences defending human rights, met with American immigration and civil liberties lawyers, and had a session with Circuit Court Judge Pamela Rymer on judging in federal courts. Field trips to Silicon Valley-based Google and eBay again put into practical context the free market, rule-of-law components discussed theoretically in the classroom.

Despite the intellectual rigor of the coursework and discussion, and the exploration of practical applicability with guest speakers and field trips, the Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program was designed as much to stimulate connections among field practitioners and to provide a forum in which to exchange ideas. Weekend dinners, stretching late into the evening at the homes of Diamond and Stoner-Weiss, helped to gel the collegiality developing in the classroom. Led by Violet Gonda, a Zimbabwean journalist living in exile in London, and Talan Aouny, director of a major Iraqi civil society development program, the fellows organized a multicultural party, a potluck-style affair in which guests made a dish from their home country to share with their colleagues and friends of the program.

Program directors McFaul and Stoner-Weiss hope this social network will endure well into the weeks and months after the program. “We envision the creation of an international network of emerging political and civic leaders in countries in transition who can share experiences and solutions to the very similar problems they and their countries face,” says Stoner-Weiss. To ensure they fulfill their goal of building a small but robust global network of civic activist and policymakers in developing countries, CDDRL recently launched its Summer Fellows Program Alumni Newsletter. The newsletter is based on an interactive website that will allow the center to strengthen its network of leaders and civic activists and facilitate more groundbreaking policy analysis across academic fields and geographic regions, the results of which will be promptly fed back to its activist alumni in a virtual loop of scholarship and policymaking.

Earlier this year, CDDRL also moved to professionalize the Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program by hiring a program manager, Laura Cosovanu, an attorney with experience in foundations and other nonprofit organizations, to oversee its advancement. The logistical acrobatics Cosovanu performed throughout the three weeks quickly became the object of good-natured teasing for some of the fellows, all of whom seemed to realize and appreciate the work required to get fellows and faculty into the same room.

As Kenza Aqertit, a National Democratic Institute for International Affairs field representative from Morocco, told program faculty at the graduation dinner, “You’ve done a great job and you should be proud of all your efforts. Plus you’ve won so many friends in so many autocracies and semi-autocracies.

Beginning this fall, I have initiated a Program on Global Justice at FSI. We are just getting started, so it strikes me as a good time to explain the fundamental ideas.

I am a philosopher by training and sensibility, and as a philosopher, I take my orientation from Immanuel Kant. Kant said that philosophy addresses three basic questions: What can we know? What should we do? And what may we hope for?

The question about hope is the most important. Philosophy is not about what will be, but about what could be: It is an exploration of possibilities guided by the hope that our world can be made more just by our common efforts.

In our world, 1 billion people are destitute. They live on less than a dollar a day. They are not imprisoned in destitution because of their crimes; they are imprisoned in destitution despite their innocence.

Another 1.5 billion people live only slightly better, on $1–2 a day. They are able to meet their basic needs, but they lack fundamental goods. They, too, are not in poverty because of their crimes. They are in poverty despite their innocence.

That is how 40 percent of our world lives now.

For some of the poor and destitute, things are improving. But the extraordinary global distance between wealthy and poor is growing. The richest 5 percent in the world make 114 times as much as the bottom 5 percent; 1 percent of the world’s people make as much as the poorest 57 percent. So the gap grows and many are left behind. That is morally unacceptable.

The problem of global injustice is not only economic. Billions of people are deprived of basic human rights.

And new forms of global governance, through organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO), are making decisions with large consequences for human welfare. Whether their decisions are good or bad, they remain largely unaccountable. That, too, is unacceptable.

Some people say that we should not worry so much because there is no such thing as global justice. Some of these skeptics say that justice is an issue only inside a state. Until there is a global state, they say, there is no global justice.

Other skeptics are communitarians. They say that justice only makes sense among people who share a culture. They say that our diverse global society lacks the common culture needed to sustain a commitment to justice.

These statist and communitarian views are misguided in a world of globalization.

Economically, globalization has made the global economy a substantial presence in the economic lives of virtually everyone in the world.

Politically, there are new forms of governance that operate outside the state. These new forms are especially important in the arena of economic regulation, but also have a role in areas of security, labor and product standards, the environment, and human rights. So we have new forms of global politics, with important consequences for human well-being.

Moreover, these new settings of global governance are the focus of an emerging global civil society of movements and nongovernmental organizations. In areas ranging from human rights, to labor standards, to environmental protection these groups contest the activities of states and global rule-making bodies.

The skeptical views may have made sense in a world with more national economic independence, less governance beyond the state, and more self-contained national communities. But that is not our world.

What, then, does the project of global justice mean? In general, it has three elements.

First, we need to ensure the protection of human rights, and we need a generous understanding of the scope of human rights. Human rights are about torture and arbitrary imprisonment, but also about health, education, and political participation. The point of human rights is not simply to protect against threats, but to ensure social membership, to ensure that all people count for something.

Second, new global rule-making bodies operating beyond the state raise questions of justice. These bodies, like the WTO, make rules with important consequences for human welfare. Global justice is about ensuring that governance by such bodies is accountable, that people who are affected are represented, that rulemaking is transparent. When an organization makes policies with large consequences for human welfare, it needs to be held accountable through a fair process.

Third, global justice is about ensuring that everyone has access to the basic goods—food, health care, education, clean water, shelter—required for a decent human life and that when the global economy is moving forward, no one is left behind.

These three elements of global justice all start from the idea that each person matters. In short, global justice is about inclusion: about making sure that no one is left out.

Some people will say that global justice is a nice idea, but that it has no real practical importance. They say that globalization leaves no room for political choices, that it requires every country to follow the same path. We must reject this false assertion of necessity.

Some people say that the right choice for global justice is to increase levels of foreign assistance; some people say that the right choice is to provide credit for poor farmers; some people say that right choice is to empower poor women; some people say that right choice is to reduce disgusting levels of overconsumption and agricultural subsidies in rich countries; some people say that the right choice is to promote a more vibrant civil society so that people can become agents in creating their history rather than its victims and supplicants.

Many things are possible. And once we accept that global justice is a fundamental imperative, and that political choices are possible, then we come back to the political tasks in more developed countries. Many citizens in the advanced economies now experience globalization as a threat. Many fear that a better life for billions who are now destitute may mean a worse life for them.

So global justice is not simply an abstract moral imperative. Global justice is connected to greater justice at home. If we leave everything to the market at home, if we don’t fight for social insurance, education and health, employment and income, then we can be sure of an economic nationalist resurgence with all of its terrible consequences. So the political project of global justice requires a political project of a more just society at home.

This unity of justice—this unity of the national and the global: That is our answer to Kant’s question. That is what we may hope for. That is what we should strive to achieve.

Several years ago, a high-level Israeli official asked me to tell him everything I could about how the Israelis might find their Palestinian Mandela. His question was interesting and appropriate but also troubling because the Afrikaners didn’t really “find” Mandela. It took several months before the answer came to me. Show me the Palestinian to whom you Israelis are willing to lose, and I will to show you your Palestinian Mandela.

My friend had overlooked the fact that Mandela and the African National Congress had won in South Africa. The decisive element in the so-called miracle was that white South Africans had, in one way or another, accepted this outcome and had made it, if not their victory, then certainly something other than their defeat.

Much has been written about the many factors that drove the process forward, but no one would deny that Mandela’s leadership played a decisive role. Although he was offered his freedom numerous times if he would just give up the struggle against apartheid, it was a deal that only a quisling would make. Made of sterner stuff, Mandela refused to make the fundamental concession that the Afrikaners sought.

De Klerk’s decision to release Mandela unconditionally came in response to the unrest that had rendered the country ungovernable. De Klerk had hoped to engage Mandela in a lengthy process of negotiation in which he could be coaxed into making critical compromises. Nevertheless, after many ups and downs, it was de Klerk, not Mandela, who made the fundamental compromises.

How did this unbelievable turn of events come about? I think that a fundamental shift took place in the way de Klerk saw Mandela. De Klerk came to power thinking that Mandela was the only African who could make the concessions needed to keep Afrikaner South Africa afloat. Slowly, he came to see Mandela instead as the African who could give Afrikaners a future they could live with.

Mandela let no opportunity pass to talk about the place of white South Africans in the new South Africa. He emphasized time and again that majority rule did not mean the domination of the white minority by a black majority. Seeking a “middle ground between white fears and black hopes,” Mandela laid the very foundation for peace—“We do not want to drive you into the sea”—because there would be no peace unless white South Africans heard and believed his words.

In virtually every statement, Mandela presented a vision of the future in which white South Africans would be appreciated and respected. Those who heard him felt that they, their family, and their community could have a satisfying and secure life in what he was describing. Rather than offering concessions that would prop up the old, Mandela was offering a future to many who had begun to doubt that they had one.

It is worth noting that Mandela had no particular liking or even personal respect for de Klerk. Their relationship was often rancorous, especially at crucial moments toward the end of the negotiations. Indeed, Mandela went so far as to say publicly that de Klerk was “not fit to be a head of a government,” and yet his worst nightmare was that de Klerk might not be there when he needed him. Mandela confessed, “Whether I like him or not is irrelevant. I need him.”

Israelis need to find a Palestinian Mandela, and Palestinians need to find an Israeli Mandela. However, the Mandela they need to find is not the leader who will make the concessions they seek but the one to whom they can make the concessions they say they cannot offer. Mandela was this kind of leader: His actions and unequivocal words gave witness to a future that Afrikaners could embrace without fear.

Progress toward peace between the Israelis and Palestinians is not stalled because no one can envision the final settlement. Every thoughtful observer knows that some rough approximation of the Clinton formula is the only deal possible. The question is not so much what is needed—this much is known. The real question is who will lead us there.

FSI’s program on global justice (PGJ), now finishing its first year, explores issues at the intersection between political values and the realities of global politics. The aim is to build conversations and research programs that integrate normative ideas—toleration, fairness, accountability, obligations, rights, representation, and the common good—into discussions about fundamental issues of global politics, including human rights, global governance, and access to such basic goods as food, shelter, clean water, education, and health care. PGJ begins from the premise that addressing these morally consequential issues will require a mix of normative reflection and attention to the best current thinking in the social sciences.

In PGJ’s first year of operation, we had several visiting fellows. Adam Hosein and Helena de Bres, both dissertation fellows from MIT, spent the year researching and writing dissertations in political philosophy on issues about global distributive justice. Larry Simon, a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School, director of Heller School’s Sustainable International Development Programs, and associate dean of academic planning, spent the winter and spring quarters working on a book on the relevance of the work of Paulo Freire to today’s poor.

Next year we will scale up the fellowship program. Helena DeBres will stay on as a postdoctoral fellow, continuing her research on utilitarian approaches to global poverty and fair distribution. She will be joined by Avia Pasternak, an Oxford PhD writing on issues about citizens’ responsibility in wealthy democracies to address issues of injustice elsewhere. Brad McHose, a UCLA PhD, and Kirsten Oleson, a recent PhD from Stanford’s IPER program, will also be affiliated with PGJ. Thorsten Theil will be a predoctoral fellow in the fall, writing on deliberative democracy and postnational politics. And Charles Beitz, a distinguished political theorist from Princeton whose Political Theory and International Relations (1979) remains the basis for much contemporary discussion of global justice, will be visiting in the winter and spring, working on a project on human rights.

Our principal activity for this past year was a regular workshop (coordinated with Stanford’s Humanities Center) covering a wide range of themes, from corporate social responsibility to the philosophical foundations of global justice, with participation from graduate students, research fellows, and faculty from political science, philosophy, economics, education, law, literature, and anthropology. In one of the liveliest sessions, Abhijit Banerjee, MIT economist and director of MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, presented his research and reflections on the strategy of using randomized field experiments to assess aid projects in developing countries. In a seminar jointly sponsored with CDDRL, Banerjee, a self-described aid optimist, expressed doubts about contemporary understanding of the determinants of economic growth and emphasized the importance of project-specific assistance and evaluation.

Richard Locke, a political scientist from MIT’s Sloan School, presented a paper based on his research at Nike and other lead firms in global supply chains that use corporate codes of conduct in their relations with suppliers. The principal finding of Locke’s research is that such codes have not been very successful in improving compensation, working conditions, or freedom of association for workers in firms that supply products to lead firms.

Amherst political theorist Uday Mehta presented a paper contrasting ideas about peace and non-violence to a seminar jointly sponsored with CISAC. Tracing the idea of a principled commitment to non-violence to Gandhi, Mehta suggested there are important costs to that principle (perhaps it requires devaluing justice), but that there are also costs to emphasizing peace as an alternative to principled non-violence: in particular, that the more conditional commitment to non-violence may end up being very permissive about the use of force.

Stanford economist Seema Jayachandran presented research on strategies for dealing with problems of odious debt. And we had workshops on the foundations of global justice with political theorists Michael Blake, Adam Hosein, Jennifer Rubenstein, and Sebastiano Maffetone; on citizenship and immigration with legal theorist Ayelet Schachar and anthropologist John Bowen; on human rights with Chip Pitts, a human rights lawyer; and on the World Bank with Sameer Dossani, a Washington political activist.

Next year, PGJ will initiate—in conjunction with Locke and his colleagues at MIT—a project called Just Supply Chains. The premise of the project is that the globalization of production is redefining employment relations and generating the need for fundamental changes in the basic institutions governing the economy. Corporations, unions, NGOs, national governments, and even international labor, trade, and financial organizations are all searching for new ways to adjust to the new international order and ensure that workers in global supply chains have decent levels of compensation, healthy and safe workplaces, and rights of association.

The project will explore three broad strategies for achieving these goals. First, it will address corporate codes of conduct and monitoring mechanisms to enforce these codes. Today, monitoring for compliance with “private voluntary codes of conduct” is one of the principal ways both global corporations and labor rights NGOs seek to promote “fair” labor standards in global supply chains. Likewise, a number of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) have banded together to promote a more collaborative/coordinated approach to improved labor standards. (The Joint Initiative for Workers Rights and Corporate Accountability in Turkey and the MFA Forum Project in Bangladesh are two of the best known examples.) But these initiatives, like the corporate codes, have produced very mixed results.

Second, much has been written about pro-labor administrative reforms by national governments (e.g., Dominican Republic, Argentina, Cambodia, and Brazil). But very little is known about whether these efforts are successful and, if they are, how to diffuse their success to other countries struggling with many of the same issues.

Third, there is speculation about how efforts at the ILO and WTO, joining labor standards to trade rules, might produce global improvements in compensation, work, and rights of association.

To explore these issues, the Just Supply Chains project will start next year with a series of workshops, bringing together “practitioners” engaged in these institutional experiments and scholars studying global supply chains, corporate responsibility, regulatory strategies, and normative ideas about global justice. We will examine what is already known about the conditions under which new arrangements and strategies can succeed in promoting fair wages and work hours, decent working conditions, and basic rights, including the right to organize collectively. The larger aim will be to define a research agenda animated by ideals of global justice, informed by understanding of current circumstances and social possibilities, and aimed at improving both our understanding and global well-being.

The Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) achieved two major goals in 2006–2007, by developing FCE into a trans-Atlantic hub for policy and academic leaders and guiding research affiliates to answer pressing questions about European Union membership. To do so the forum launched and greatly expanded research and public programs on Europe’s Eastern, Scandinavian, and Iberian regions and addressed dramatic change and instability in the west in governing coalitions and the social fabric of Europe’s traditional powers.

Forum projects addressed several important, interrelated questions. Can the EU integrate its members into a unified polity and civic society, or should it retreat to a sole project of a common market? Should and can the EU Commission form a European foreign policy? How far should Europe’s union extend—to Turkey, to the former Soviet republics, to the North African Maghreb? Answers to these questions have implications for trans-Atlantic and EU-NATO-UN relations and for postindustrial labor, immigration, and welfare policy, democratization and human rights initiatives, and regional crisis intervention. An engaging and productive year of analyzing Europe’s policy dilemmas has clarified the benefits and burdens of the emerging European model of political, social, and economic membership.

Western Europe: Elections and Uncertain Promise

On Jan. 1, 2007, Europe enlarged its union to 27 nations. As Europe extended its borders from Portugal to Bulgaria, and from Sweden to Greece, the EU Council of Ministers reiterated its commitment to shepherd seven more nations, including Turkey, to meet the Copenhagen Criteria for membership. However, elections, resignations, and new leaders in Europe’s traditional powers have clouded this optimistic vision, and the forum addressed pressing concerns along with the promise of expansion.

Four highly anticipated forum events—the French presidential election roundtable, a Europe Now: Integration, Society, and Islam in a New Europe lecture by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Payne Lecture by Ian McEwan, and an address by German Ambassador Klaus Scharioth—raised issues for all forum programs. Throughout the year, the forum invited a spectrum of research centers to co-sponsor its events, including CISAC, CDDRL, the Program on Global Justice, the Woods Institute, the France-Stanford Center, Humanities Center, Abbasi Program on Islamic Studies, Mediterranean Forum, Stanford Law School, and the Graduate School of Business.

On prospects for integrating Europe’s polity and society, Cohn-Bendit and McEwan spoke on separate occasions to overflow FSI audiences. Cohn-Bendit, head of the European Parliament Greens/New Alliance party, noted the diverse political cultures in Western and Eastern Europe, as well as the region’s significant Muslim community, and envisioned the EU as the institution to create a polity governed federally and based nevertheless on commonly agreed upon European values. McEwan, delivering a preview of a work to be published soon, characterized post-9/11 Western modernity by tracing a history of fundamentalism since the origin of the Christian West. Communalism and exclusive claims to truth, in McEwan’s reading, are organic to the West and may plague the rationalizing project of a new Europe. Scharioth discussed German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ambition to revive a European constitution. Merkel, the first German post-war leader to have been a citizen of the GDR, sees integration not as an option but as a necessity after 1989 and is brokering with a group of European partners to carry the project forward. The chancellor may gain support from new French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who proposes to move forward by avoiding popular referenda in favor of parliamentary treaties.

On post-election France, five affiliated researchers from Stanford and UC Berkeley, representing different disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, joined for a roundtable discussion of the conduct and consequences of the French presidential election. Speaking to a standing-room-only audience, the panel debated voting patterns and the future of the main parties and offered an insider’s early look at where France is headed and the implications of the Sarkozy presidency for Francophone, EU, and trans-Atlantic relations.

France, of course, is one of the last of Europe’s major powers to elect a leader with no personal memory of World War II. Sarkozy, like Merkel, Blair, and Zapatero, also held government posts during Europe’s paralysis in the Balkan genocide. The boast that the EU eliminated war from Europe may therefore be increasingly less compelling for Europe’s new generation of leaders. Without articulating the origins of his policy, this new French president makes it difficult to divine his view of Europe. It has been noted that Sarkozy, in his inaugural speech, declared that “France is back in Europe”; however he confused both sides of the Atlantic on what “in Europe” means to him by categorically rejecting the EU Commission’s commitment to pursue Turkish accession. It remains to be explained how he understands what France is in a European polity and economy, who the French are in a post-colonial immigrant society, and how France will position itself as both a global actor and a trans-Atlantic partner.

The forum planned the faculty roundtable as the first pillar of a multi-year study of European elections, to continue in 2007–2008 with a major address on reform at the heart of European political culture. Next year, the forum will host an address by the president of France’s École Normale Supérieure on the vision of a new European liberalism—a political philosophy responding to European post-war socialism and U.S. neo-conservativism and labeled by some political theorists as “social liberalism.” This will coincide with programs on the United Kingdom and its run-up to elections and what could amount to a referendum on the earliest of the post-war generation governments—the Blair administration and Britain’s New Labor. Also planned is the forum’s 2007–2008 “Europe Now” lecture by Sweden’s former foreign minister Jan Eliasson, who currently serves as the U.N. special envoy for Darfur.

New Europe: Expansion and Global Reach

Finally, this author is conducting a study of European Union international intervention missions. The initiative to form a common European security and defense policy (ESDP), and to marshal member nation troops, is perhaps the greatest challenge confronting European ambition to address global issues. In 2007, the EU Council noted, “The idea that the European Union should speak with one voice in world affairs is as old as the European integration process itself.” Our study investigates case studies of EU missions in Kosovo, Congo, and Darfur, in which EU policies fluctuated between robust and tentative goals, revealing divisions on the goal of acting as one within and beyond Europe.

What are the preconditions for democracy? National identity? Economic wealth? Relative economic equality? How does an unstable, illiberal democracy become a well-functioning, stable one? And what role can assistance play in a country that is transitioning to democracy?

On March 5–6, 2007, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and The National Academies co-sponsored a conference at Stanford that opened with just such questions. The conference, Understanding Democratic Transitions and Consolidation from Case Studies: Lessons for Democracy Assistance, brought scholars on democracy and development together with democracy assistance practitioners from organizations such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), National Endowment for Democracy, and Freedom House. Their goal: to review research and methodologies in the field of “applied democratic development.”

“Mobilize democracy as a feminist movement and you mobilize half the population worldwide. It is the same for farmers.”

Applied democratic development is a relatively new field, one that “melds insights from the academic, policy, and practitioner worlds,” according to USAID. Although democracy and governance programs have a 20-year history in U.S. foreign policy, there are few comparative analyses of the effectiveness of this programming, the various factors that interact with it, and how these factors affect each program’s likelihood of success. Recognizing the limited rigor in best-practice handbooks and in-house program evaluations, USAID turned to the academic community to help assess and improve methodologies for cross-national research—research that will ultimately provide recommendations for improving existing programs and identify optimal conditions for future ones.

Commissioned to help with this outreach, The National Academies asked scholars including CDDRL and CISAC faculty member Jeremy M. Weinstein to join a Committee on the Evaluation of USAID Democracy Assistance Programs (CEUDAP). The six-member committee will oversee an independent, third-party study on how to apply quantitative political science research to on-the-ground democracy assistance programs. In addition to ongoing committee meetings in Washington D.C., CEUDAP held a workshop on democracy and governance indicators and the Understanding Democratic Transitions and Consolidation From Case Studies conference in order to draw on the work and insight of a larger academic community.

At the end of the yearlong project, CEUDAP will have produced three field studies and a set of recommendations for USAID and other democracy assistance organizations and will incorporate the conference proceedings into the final CEUDAP report. This information will help not only democracy assistance practitioners but also policymakers weighing which programs to support, in what countries.

CDDRL director Michael A. McFaul, who co-authored Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic Breakthrough (2006) with Anders Aslund, opened the conference with an overview of the CEUDAP project and goals for the discussion over the next two days. He also outlined CDDRL’s own research project, sponsored by the Smith Richardson Foundation, which seeks to assess all external dimensions of democratization, including European efforts as well as democracy assistance programs conducted by private actors. “We in academia have to do a better job of helping our colleagues in government understand what works and what does not,” McFaul remarked. “Democracy assistance is simply too important an enterprise to continue to do without learning from past successes and failures.”

In the first morning session, CEUDAP chair and George Mason University professor Jack Gladstone moderated a panel discussion on democratic transitions that included McFaul and CDDRL senior research scholar Terry L. Karl. Two more afternoon panels also looked at various factors in transitions. Does research support a connection between state strength and regime type? What does democratization in Germany, France, and Spain tell us about preconditions for democratic transitions? Can external actors manipulate the impact of wealth distributions, since countries with highly stratified economies have the hardest time making a transition to democracy?

Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that promotes democracy and political transparency, wanted to know what the discussion’s implications were for a democracy practitioner. Even in the non-applied fields of democratic development and “quality of democracy,” someone offered, researchers are often working toward a shifting target with incomplete information. Risto Volanen, state secretary in the Finnish Prime Minister’s Office, suggested changing how we frame democratization. “Democracy is a long historical process that happens in the mind of ordinary humans,” he said. “On both sides of the Atlantic, we misunderstand the condition of our democracies.”

The second morning examined procedures that work better in consolidating, rather than transitioning to, democracy—stabilizing new democracies rather than trying to “move countries from column A, undemocratic, to column B, democratic,” for example. Weinstein suggested looking at indicators of growth rather than growth itself and trying to define a “set of different transition paths we could imagine each country taking.”

In the panel that followed, CDDRL democracy program coordinator Larry Diamond and CDDRL predoctoral fellow Amichai Magen discussed combining democratic assistance with other forms of aid to promote consolidation. “Beware,” Diamond told the room. “None of this works without political will.” He draws from experience as well as research; Diamond was senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, perhaps one of the highest-profile experiments in democracy intervention this decade.

While participants disagreed on specific, ground-level dynamics of democratic development, a few points of consensus broadly took shape. Most people in the room —scholars, policymakers, and practitioners alike— recognized the need to have realistic expectations and to take a long view of democratization. Another area of agreement was that intervention seemed to work best in countries where internal forces are already moving. Finally, a precondition for new democracies seemed to be the development of the “democratic mind”—a democratic culture marked by a robust and engaged civil society. “Mobilize democracy as a feminist movement and you mobilize half the population worldwide,” Volanen pointed out. “It is the same for farmers.”

Kathryn Stoner, CDDRL associate director for research, moderated the first of two roundtables that concluded the conference. Seeking consensus on factors at work in democratization, many in the room realized just how elusive a precise set of guidelines for democracy assistance and intervention actually was. But there are many more months left on the CEUDAP project timetable and many more angles to come at the issue from.

“This is not physics,” Diamond said. “It’s virtually impossible to control for all forms of data.”

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is a means for industrial nations, known as Annex 1 countries, to meet their greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets by taking credit for reductions from projects they fund in developing countries. The idea is that projects to reduce emissions will cost less to develop and implement in the developing countries where technology is further behind. Industrialized countries can achieve more reductions via investment in the developing countries, achieving greater emissions reductions for less sunk cost. At least this is the idea under the Kyoto Protocol. A researcher at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD), Michael Wara says this, in fact, is not how the CDM is working.

Wara lectures at Stanford Law School, teaching the popular class International Environmental Law. A graduate of Stanford Law School, Wara also has a PhD in Ocean Sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz. His doctoral work on the interaction between climate change and oceanatmosphere dynamics in the tropics echoes in his current research on the CDM. He understands the science of greenhouse gases and how they affect Earth and its climate. One of those greenhouse gases is HFC-23, a byproduct of manufacturing refrigerants. HFC-23 is one of the gases countries targeted to reduce under the CDM; it can be eliminated rather easily and has been seen as the “low hanging fruit” of the CDM. In fact, more than half the greenhouse gas reductions of CDMs to date have been reached via reducing HFC-23 in developing counties. For the reductions, the project sponsor countries receive credits to put toward meeting their own reductions targets. These credits are called Certified Emission Reductions or CERs.

This is where Wara noticed a big discrepancy between what was credited through the CDM and what was actually happening on the ground. The CERs are not just feel-good pieces of paper that countries collect as proof of their doing good but are certifications of equivalent reductions of one metric tonne CO2 emissions. Carbon is the standardizing greenhouse gas and so regardless of what greenhouse gas is reduced with the CDM the sponsoring country is credited with CERs. But these “carbon credits” have a value—carbon is a traded commodity on many global markets. Wara could directly compare the CDM effect versus the credits issued. Since the cost of implementing the reductions was known or could be calculated, and since the credits were standardized to a greenhouse gas being traded on an open market, Wara could quantitatively critique the CDM.

Wara’s finding showed a major flaw in the CDM design. Looking at the large percentage of greenhouse gas reductions met within the CDM by eliminating HFC-23, the value of the credits created by these reductions were more than four times as valuable as the cost of implementing the reductions. This is not small change, as billions of dollars worth of CERs have been credited for the projects. What is more, the credits for eliminating the HFC-23 byproduct of manufacturing refrigerant were far more valuable than the refrigerant itself, creating incentives to build these manufacturing plants in order to cash-in on the CERs. Exposing these loopholes has brought attention to Wara’s work. He has presented his findings at numerous conferences and published his report (Nature 445, 595-596 (8 February 2007) doi:10.1038/445595a) and derivatives broadly. Wara continues to study the CDM and the global market for greenhouse gases and the post-Kyoto regime for reducing their emissions.

On November 15, 2007, FSI held its third annual international conference, Power and Prosperity: New Dynamics, New Dilemmas, examining seismic shifts in power, wealth, security, and risk in the global system. Acting FSI Director Michael A. McFaul, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry offered stagesetting remarks before a capacity crowd of business and civic leaders, diplomats, policymakers, faculty, and students. Interactive panel sessions encouraged exploration of contemporary issues with Stanford faculty and outside experts.

“For more than two centuries , a debate has raged in our country over whether the Congress or the president has the power to start, conduct, and terminate a war,” stated former Secretary of State Warren Christopher. The issue has been made urgent by what is called the “War on Terror,” regarded by many as almost unlimited in duration and geographic scope. “One frontier issue is whether the commander-in-chief authority gives the president the power to override the Constitution,” he said, specifically “whether or not the president can authorize torture that may offend the Constitution, wiretap American citizens, and suspend habeas corpus.”

Christopher and former Secretary of State Jim Baker are heading a new National War Powers Commission to study and resolve these issues. Planning to do something of a prospective nature, they will focus their recommendations on the 2009 Congress, seeking to bring to bear the collective judgment of both the president and a Congress traditionally reluctant to exercise the power it has under the Constitution.

“I spent most of my adult life under the dark cloud of a nuclear holocaust, a war that threatened no less than the annihilation of humanity,” said former Secretary of Defense William Perry. Now the Cold War is over, but its end did not bring about the end of history. “History is being written every day in the streets of Bagdad, in the deserts of Darfur, in the nuclear test range of North Korea, and in the nuclear laboratories of Iran.”

Perry identified four potential security threats: the danger of a nuclear terrorist attack, drifting into a new Cold War, drifting into an environmental disaster, and the danger that radical fundamentalists will gain ascendancy in the Islamic world. “There is a fundamental conflict between our need to keep nuclear bombs out of the hands of terrorists and our need to reduce carbon emissions,” he stated, for the global movement to increase nuclear power could increase terrorists’ ability to get fissile materials. “The solution must lie,” he advised, “in establishing international protocols for how nuclear plants are operated and nuclear fuel supplies are controlled.”

A complementary route is to work to reduce and then eliminate nuclear weapons. Getting to the political will to take those steps was a major objective of a January 4, 2007, Wall Street Journal op-ed, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” published by Perry, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, and conferences at Stanford. “This conference can teach us what to do,” Perry said, “what is needed is the political will to do it.”

Gi-Wook Shin, director of FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, chaired Plenary I, “Asia’s Triple Rise: How China, India, and Japan Will Shape our Future.” “While our policymakers are preoccupied with the Middle East, Asia is going to have much more impact on our future,” Shin said. Asia is experiencing a unique moment in Asian and world history. Can three great nations rise simultaneously, creating a regional architecture for stability and security? What role can the United States play?

“There are two defining characteristics of today’s world,” said J. Stapleton Roy, former U.S. ambassador to China, “America’s role as the sole superpower and China’s precipitous rise to power and influence.” Roy traced China’s resource demands, military development, and global economic impact and evaluated China’s influence on U.S. foreign policy. “While we see a more powerful and prosperous China as a security threat,” he stated, “the case could be made for a more optimistic scenario in which growth creates a sizable middle class, greater global dependence, and a more open society as the fifth generation of Chinese leaders takes over, the first to mature in a period of openness to the world and the power of modern democracies.”

“The only democracy in the world with which the United States had endemically bad relations during the Cold War was India. Happily that has changed,” said Robert Blackwill, former U.S. ambassador to India. He addressed our many areas of common interest: the fight against global terrorism, energy security, a healthy global economy, and shared democratic values. Analyzing the pending civil nuclear cooperation deal, he placed India’s need for 15–20 new nuclear reactors in the context of domestic growth. Some 450 million people make less than $1.50 per day; India will not tolerate outside direction to slow growth. “The United States and India are natural allies,” he concluded.

“The India entering its seventh decade as an independent country is one that is open to the contention of ideas and interests within it and outside … wedded to the democratic pluralism that is its greatest strength and determined to fulfill the creative energies of its people. Such an India truly enjoys soft power in today’s world.” former under secretary-general of the united nations shashi tharoor“Japan has resumed a solid growth track,” said Michael H. Armacost, Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow and former U.S. ambassador to Japan. The country seeks respect and wants a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, which it deserves. Japan’s economy is four times the size of China’s; Japan’s military budget is just 1 percent of GDP, yet it is the third largest in the world and the most sophisticated in Asia. Japan has the resources of a great power—huge financial reserves, modern science and technology, and enormous aid and investment flows. As Japan assumes a more robust international role, we should expect the Japanese to “hedge their bets,” he said, balancing strong U.S. ties with other nations and competing with China in pan-Asian community building efforts. Japan-U.S. relations should not be forgotten, he advised, as we focus on China and India.

Shashi Tharoor, diplomat, historian, and former U.N. under secretary-general, mused about “India’s Future as a Great Power.” Asking what makes a country a world leader, he acknowledged that India has the world’s second largest population, fourth largest military, status as a nuclear power, and the fifth largest economy. Yet a nation that cannot feed, educate, or employ its people cannot be termed a “great power,” Tharoor noted. He suggested that India’s greatest asset is its “soft power”— its liberal democracy, social and cultural diversity, and enormously popular culture. All hold important lessons. “The India entering its seventh decade as an independent country,” he said, “is open to the contentions of ideas and interests within it and outside … wedded to the democratic pluralism that is its greatest strength and determined to liberate and fulfill the creative energies of its people. Such an India truly enjoys soft power in today’s world.”

Lynn Eden, associate director for research at CISAC, chaired Plenary II, “Critical Connections: Faces of Security in the 21st Century,” examining security risks posed by Iraq, nuclear weapons, and food security and the environment—issues, she noted, “that are also central themes of the Stanford International Initiative: improving governance, pursuing security, and advancing human well-being.”

“There are now multiple indications that conditions on the ground in Iraq have improved quite substantially,” said Hoover Institution denior fellow and CDDRL faculty member Larry Diamond. Violence is down and there is a return to something approaching normalcy, as a result of the 30,000 “surge” in U.S. troops and a more effective counterinsurgency strategy adopted by General David Petraeus. The new military-sized force and strategy come at a propitious moment, when the Sunni Arab heartland has turned against Al Qaeda. As Al Qaeda has been weakened, fear, fatal bombings, and Iraqi and U.S. fatalities have declined significantly. The problem is that strategic military gains have not been matched with requisite political progress: enacting an oil revenue sharing bill, reversing de-Baathification, and scheduling provincial elections. “The harsh fact is that military progress on the ground is not sustainable,” warned Diamond, “without political progress toward reconciliation in Bagdad and the provinces.”

“As Americans, we have not thought systematically about what it means when we use the phrase ‘Islamic fundamentalism.’ We tend to treat it holistically. If we are going to understand this threat, we have to disaggregate that big thing called ‘the Muslim world’—we have to know the difference between Islamic fundamentalist, Islamist, and liberal Muslims.” acting fsi director and political science professor michael a. mcfaulAssessing nuclear proliferation, CISAC Co-Director Scott D. Sagan said, “In 1963, John F. Kennedy famously relayed his nuclear nightmare that by the 1970s there might be 15–20 nuclear weapons states. Was Kennedy’s fear inaccurate or only premature?” Today there are nine nuclear states, but the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is cracked and challenges abound. The A.Q. Khan network in Pakistan exported nuclear technology to Libya, North Korea, and Iran. North Korea withdrew from the NPT and conducted a 2006 test, before agreeing to dismantle its nuclear program. Iran has rejected international demands to suspend uranium enrichment. The United States has not lived up to its NPT commitment to work toward eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. For Sagan, keys to nonproliferation include a successful U.N. 2010 NPT Review Conference, peaceful resolution of the North Korean and Iranian crises, developing control of the international fuel cycle, and American ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Turning to human security, Rosamond L. Naylor, the Julie Wrigley Senior Fellow at FSI and the Woods Institute for the Environment, reported that 1 billion people face acute risks every day from hunger, infectious disease, resource depletion, climate change, and civil conflict. Incredibly, 15 percent of the world’s population lives on less than $1 per day and 50 percent live on less than $2 a day. Three billion people are vulnerable to disruptions in food prices because of competing biofuels and climate change. While terrorism kills 3,000 people each year and battle deaths claim 20,000, more than 6–8 million people die every year from hunger and malnutrition. “What can be done?” asked Naylor. We urgently need to conserve our genetic crop resources and invest in rural development, agriculture, and education.

Gilles Kepel, professor and chair, Middle East and Mediterranean Studies, at Sciences Po, delivered the dinner keynote, “Islamic Fundamentalism: On the Rise or the Decline?” “As Americans we have not thought systematically about what it means when we use the phrase ‘Islamic fundamentalism,’” said Acting FSI Director Michael McFaul. “If we are going to understand this threat, we have to disaggregate that big thing called ‘the Muslim world’—we have to know the difference between Islamic fundamentalist, Islamist, and liberal Muslims.” Gilles Kepel, a leading author and scholar of the Middle East, who has “invested tremendously in the study of Islam,” was invited to fill that void. “When it comes to understanding Islamic fundamentalism, Paris is the 21st century,” said McFaul. “I see it as a real challenge to all of us to learn from our French colleagues, and tonight I promise you, you will learn from one of our French colleagues.”

In a December 2001 manifesto, Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s mentor and Al Qaeda ideologue, admitted Islamic jihadists had failed to mobilize the masses to overthrow their corrupt rulers, “the nearby enemy,” and establish Islamic states, Kepel began. By inflicting a massive blow on 9/11 on “the far enemy,” the United States, they would demonstrate that America was weak, Islamic militants were strong, and the masses could revolt against their leaders without fear. The Muslim world and then the whole world would become ruled by Shariah under Islamist aegis. Kepel then asked, “Have they succeeded in what they set out to do?”

“After 9/11, we had a clash of two grand narratives: ‘jihad and martyrdom’ where the apostate regimes of the West and the Middle East were about to fall and ‘the War on Terror’ in which the roots of terrorism would be eradicated and autocratic regimes would tumble, bringing about democracy and a transformation of the Middle East.” professor gilles kepel, institute of political studies, parisKepel’s answer was no. Since 9/11, he said, “There have been two grand narratives: the narrative of jihad and martyrdom preached by Zawahiri and bin Laden, arguing that the rotten regimes of the West and the Middle East would fall, as jihadists waged copy-cat bombings in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, suicide operations, and so forth” and “the narrative of the American-led War on Terror,” hammering that the roots of terrorism would be eradicated and autocratic regimes would tumble, bringing about democracy and the transformation of the Middle East.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq opened a new area for radical Islamic mobilization. But the two clashing narratives gave ground to something unexpected: the rise of Iranian influence in the region and “a golden opportunity not for Sunni Islamic fundamentalists but for the radical Shia in Iran,” who after the 2005 election of President Ahmadinejad found they could engage in nuclear blackmail with the world and threaten the United States with the activation of Shiite militias in Iraq, where American forces would be at a disadvantage fighting two enemies at the same time.

While Zawahiri continues to paint the “triumphal march of Sunni fundamentalism,” Kepel stated, “the discrepancy between his world view and reality is growing bigger and bigger.” To date, the bigger winner from 9/11 is not Al Qaeda but the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran and Hezbollah have become the heroes and champions of the Muslim world. This fragmentation in the Muslim world, pitting Shia against Sunni, has weakened the Sunni radical movements’ ability to mobilize. How the confrontation plays out, he concluded, will determine the future of the Middle East.

POWER AND PROSPERITY: NEW DYNAMICS, NEW DILEMAS

INTERACTIVE PANEL DISCUSSIONS ON CRITICAL ISSUES
In an FSI conference highlight, participants engaged in spirited debate on leading issues with Stanford faculty and outside experts. Audio recordings of the plenary and panel discussions are available below.

IS DEMOCRACY GOOD FOR HEALTH?
Alan M. Garber, Grant Miller, Douglas K. Owens, and Paul H. Wise

NUCLEAR POWER WITHOUT NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION?
Scott D. Sagan, David G. Victor, Robert Rosner, and Siegfried S. Hecker

A CHANGING CONTINENT? OPPERTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES FOR EUROPEAN UNION EXPANSION
Katherine Jolluck, Mark Leonard, Monica Macovei, and Wolfgang Münchau

GROWING PAINS - GROWTH AND TENISIONS IN CHINA
Andrew G. Walder, Jean C. Oi, Scott Rozelle, and Xueguang Zhou

AUTOCRATIC HEGEMONS AND THE NATIONAL INTEREST: DEALING WITH CHINA, IRAN, AND RUSSIA
Kathryn Stoner, Larry Diamond, Michael A. McFaul, and Abbas Milani

FOOD SECURITY, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND CIVIL CONFLICTf
Rosamond L. Naylor, David Lobell, and Edward A. Miguel

FACES OF ENGERY SECURITY
David G. Victor, Bryan J. Hannegan, and Chris Mottershead

OVERCOMING BARRIERS TO CONFLICT RESOLUTION: THE MIDDLE EAST
Allen S. Weiner, Byron Bland, Bruce Jones, and Lee D. Ross

Larry Diamond—Hoover Institution senior fellow, CDDRL democracy program coordinator, and former senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq—has just discussed causes and consequences of corruption and international efforts to control it with a room full of visiting fellows. This is not just a group of learned political scientists, however, and Diamond does not hesitate to follow a sophisticated piece of analysis with a hard-nosed, view-from-the-ground assessment. He has, for instance, just told the fellows what he thinks of a major development institution. (“I think the World Bank needs to be ripped apart and fundamentally restructured.”) He has extended the concept of a “resource curse” to include not just oil but also international assistance. (“In many countries, aid is like oil; it’s used for outside rents.”) He has recommended that institutions learn the “dance of conditionality” and exercise selectivity, choosing countries to invest in based on demonstrated performance. But the 27 fellows around the table know a thing or two about corruption. Most of them face it in their home countries; many of them have made fighting it part of their work. And almost all of their hands go up to tell Diamond that there is something he missed, or something he got right.

This year’s 27 Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development—outstanding civic, political, and economic leaders from developing democracies—were selected from more than 500 applicants to take part in the program, which FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) hosted July 30–August 17, 2007. They traveled to Stanford from 22 countries in transition, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And like their academic curriculum during the three-week program, which examines linkages among democracy, economic development, and the rule of law, their professional experiences and fields of study center on these three areas, assuring that each fellow brings a seasoned perspective to the program’s discussions.

“Should the United States promote democracy? Can the United States promote democracy?” The curriculum for the first week focused on defining the concepts of “democracy,” “development,” and the “rule of law” and identifying institutions that support democratic and market development. Using selected articles and book chapters as starting points for discussion, CDDRL Director Michael A. McFaul and Marc Plattner, National Endowment for Democracy vice-president for research and studies, began the weeklong module with an examination of what democracy is and what definition or definitions might apply to distinguish electoral democracy, liberal democracy, and competitive authoritarianism. Another question discussed was whether there was such a thing as Islamic democracy, Asian democracy, Russian democracy, or American democracy.

Faculty including Diamond, CDDRL associate director for research Kathryn Stoner, Stanford president emeritus and constitutional law scholar Gerhard Casper, Stanford Law School lecturer Erik Jensen, and economists Avner Greif and Seema Jayachandran “team-taught” individual sessions as the week progressed. Fellows and faculty discussed how to define and measure development, the role and rule of law in societies, how legal systems affect democratic development, constitutionalism, electoral systems, parliamentary versus presidential systems, horizontal accountability, and market development. Fellows worked in groups to discuss and present their conclusions about an issue to their colleagues, comparing experiences and sharing insights into how well political parties and parliaments constrained executive power and how civil society organizations contributed to democratic consolidation.

In addition to discussing their personal experiences with democracy promotion, economic development, and legal reform, fellows met with a broad range of practitioners, including USAID deputy director Maria Rendon Labadan, National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman, U.S. Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit Judge Pamela Rymer, IREX president Mark Pomar, Freedom House chairman and International Center on Nonviolent Conflict founding chair Peter Ackerman, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict president Jack DuVall, The Orange Revolution documentary filmmaker Steve York, and government affairs attorney Patrick Shannon. Guest speakers talked about their fieldwork, offered practical advice, and answered fellows’ questions.

This component grounded the classroom discussions in a practical context. “It was important for our visiting fellows to interact with American practitioners, both to learn about innovative techniques for improving democracy practices but also to hear about frustrations and failures that Americans also face in working to make democracy and democracy promotion work more effectively,” explained McFaul. “We Americans do not have all the answers and have much to learn from interaction with those in the trenches working to improve governance in their countries.”

As the program’s curriculum shifted to democratic and economic transitions for week two, McFaul and Stoner-Weiss balanced the structure of the classroom with guest lecturers, a documentary film premiere, and field trips to Google headquarters and San Francisco media organizations to put into practical context the components discussed theoretically in the classroom. The field trip to San Francisco included a session with KQED Forum executive producer Raul Ramirez, a briefing with the editorial board at the San Francisco Chronicle, and a discussion of links between violence against women and children and poverty, health, and security at the Family Violence Prevention Fund.

“We are building an extraordinary community of democratic activists and officials who have a deeper understanding of the types of institutions that secure freedom, control corruption, and foster sustainable development.” The third week’s curriculum looked at international and domestic efforts to promote democracy, development, and the rule of law. This integrative module drew on the teaching caliber of Stephen D. Krasner (FSI senior fellow), Peter B. Henry (Graduate School of Business), Allen S. Weiner and Helen Stacy (Stanford Law School), and Nicholas Hope (Stanford Center for International Development) as well as Casper, Jensen, McFaul, and Stoner-Weiss. Through case studies and, in particular, comparison of successes and failures in the fellows’ own experiences, faculty and fellows explored and assessed international strategies for promoting rule of law, reconciliation of past human rights abuses, democracy, and good governance. The discussions, occasionally contentious, circled in on a set of central questions: Should the United States promote democracy? Can the United States promote democracy? What are the links between democracy and increasing the rule of law, controlling corruption, rebuilding societies shattered by massive human rights violations, and promoting good governance?

Despite the intellectual rigor of the coursework and discussion, and the exploration of practical applicability with guest speakers and field trips, the Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program was designed as much to stimulate connections among field practitioners and to provide a forum in which to exchange ideas. “Through the summer fellows program, we are building an extraordinary community of democratic activists and officials who have a deeper understanding of the types of institutions that secure freedom, control corruption, and foster sustainable development, and who are keeping in touch with us and with one another,” said Diamond. “When I meet our ‘alumni’ fellows in subsequent years, they speak movingly of the bonds they formed and the insights they gained in these three fast-paced weeks.”

To ensure they fulfill their goal of building a small but robust global network of civic activist and policymakers in developing countries, CDDRL launched a Summer Fellows Program Alumni Newsletter. The newsletter is based on an interactive website that will allow the center to strengthen its network of leaders and civic activists and facilitate more groundbreaking policy analysis across academic fields and geographic regions, the results of which will be promptly fed back to its activist alumni in a virtual loop of scholarship and policymaking. “We envision the creation of an international network of emerging political and civic leaders in countries in transition,” said Stoner-Weiss, “who can share experiences and solutions to the very similar problems they and their countries face.”

 

SSFDD ALUMNI FOCUS: VIOLET GONDA
A producer and pre s ent er for SW Radio Africa (London), Violet Gonda was a Stanford Summer Fellow on Democracy and Development in 2006, the same year her station was named the International Station of the Year by the Association of International Broadcasters. "CDDRL brings together a cross-section of people from different backgrounds, different careers," Gonda said. "Politicians, lawyers, activists ... all in the same room. It is an amazing group of people."

Banned from returning to her home country because of her journalism work at the radio station-"we are welcome in Zimbabwe but only in the prisons"-Gonda "literally eat[s], breathe[s], and dream[s] Zimbabwe." The summer fellows program, she said, gave her a broad perspective on what's going on in other countries; "it is so intensive ... you can really compare and contrast democracy on every continent." One thing Gonda found is that "when you look at these leaders, you'd think they all were born of the same mother ... and the ways people respond to these crises are the same."

Gonda had such a positive experience at Stanford that she decided to apply for, and was accepted to, the prestigious John S. Knight Fellowships for journalists for the academic year 2007-08. "It's always been Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe," she said. "Now I finally have time to sit down and read a book, write an article, go to seminars, sharpen my skills." She is not exactly sitting still however. In December she gave a presentation on Zimbabwe's political situation for the Center on African Studies, and will also be discussing Zimbabwe at the Palo Alto Rotary Club and the Bechtel International Center. "Media in America does not have a lot of international news, particularly on Africa," Gonda said. "So it's a good opportunity to talk about Zimbabwe, and I will take advantage of it."

She is also working on developing new content for SW Radio Africa and plans to interview FSI scholars she met through the summer fellows program so "We are building an extraordinary community of democratic activists and officials who have a deeper understanding of the types of institutions that secure freedom, control corruption, and foster sustainable development." that Zimbabweans can understand what is going on in different countries. Close contact with program alumni means that she has friends and colleagues in other parts of that world who can be called on for their perspective on situations. While SW Radio Africa's mission is "to record and to expose" developments in Zimbabwe, Gonda explained, "it's good to compare, to show people we are not alone, that this is happening elsewhere."